Ever since Phil Spencer took over as head of Xbox and Satya Nadella made it clear that Microsoft wasn't going to be spinning off its highly visible gaming division, the company has been working to increase cooperation between its Windows business and its console business. We've seen cross play, cross buy, promises of easy ports between Xbox and Windows 10, and lots of talk about how Xbox fits into Microsoft's broader business. It's all well and good: Microsoft is remembering that it owns the most popular gaming platform on planet Earth, and its trying to use that power to enhance its console business. It's trying to recover from the memory of Games for Windows Live and chart a new future for its gaming business on console and PC. Sounds great!

At some point, however, we've got to stop looking at musings about the future and start looking at what's actually out there, this Gears of War: Ultimate Edition thing looks nasty. Microsoft has been very vocal about how easy it is to port games from Xbox to Windows 10 with DirectX12, and yet we've got one of the company's own properties launching with terrible performance. We've had no shortage of poor PC ports recently, and in an ideal world, exclusives should show the world just how well games can run on a given company's hardware. That's clearly not the case here.

I'm a big believer in a closer relationship between PC and Xbox. The lines between consoles and PCs are being eroded every day, and both the companies involved and gamers stand to benefit a lot from a more integrated ecosystem. We've got to do much better than this if it's going to work, however. PC ports of console games have a terrible reputation across the industry, and Microsoft hasn't done anything to assuage that here. Forza, maybe?